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Category Archives: social studies

Two years ago, Ms. Shelley Olin and I collaborated on a student voice project at the very end of the year. Students picked current news topics that mattered to them, researched the topics, and created letters and art to send to local, state, and federal representatives. In addition, they created Flipgrid videos of their letters and art to inspire other young people to raise their voices too.

We loved this project so much and wished we had given it more time. This year, Ms. Olin made student voice a priority in her social studies blocks. She wants students to start the year with what it means to be a citizen, what our rights are, and how we can speak up on topics that matter even if we are not old enough to vote. She wants to weave this thread of citizen voice throughout the year as students study events in US history. We hope that they see how many of the topics from the past are still topics we are working on today.

Ms. Olin scheduled all 4 of her social studies classes to visit the library to kickoff this idea before they dive into US history.

Voices from the Past

We opened our time together by listening to students from 2 years ago. I selected 5 students for us to revisit and hear about the issue that mattered to them.

We used these students to connect to the Bill of Rights and why this document exists. We specifically focused on Amendment 1 and our freedom of speech. We read the first amendment as written and also a translation. I wanted students to know that even at their age, they can speak up about things in the world that they want to see improve, and our students from 2 years ago were exercising that right.

Next, we thought more broadly about our freedoms. We looked at the book My Little Book of Big Freedoms illustrated by Chris Riddell. Students read the single words on each page while I read the longer descriptions.

We paused on the page about hope because it reminded us that adults can choose our leaders, but it’s every person’s responsibility to speak up about how our country is run.

Again, I wanted to emphasize as much as possible that students should begin to pay attention to what is happening in our world, research current events and topics, and speak up in appropriate spaces to help make the world a better place.

Global Goals

This finally brought us to the Global Goals, which were established in 2015 by a gathering of world leaders. The goals include targets that the whole world should be working on in order to see a better world by 2030. I asked students to visit https://www.globalgoals.org/ and scan through the 17 goal topics. I wanted them to pick a few that stood out to them, their interests, and their concerns. Then, I wanted students to spend time reading the goals and their targets.

As students explored, it didn’t take long for intense conversations to spark at tables. The collaborating teachers and I rotated among the tables and chatted with students about their discoveries and their thoughts. Some students were so fired up on topics, they were ready to write a letter that very day. It was inspiring to hear students already speaking with passion on topics that might not have surfaced if they weren’t given this space to speak about it.

Some students got fired up about single-use plastics polluting our oceans. Others talked about gender equality and how women and men need the same kinds of opportunities around the world. Students were having matter-of-fact conversations about poverty and hunger around the world, including right here in our own city. A few students spoke up about the importance of clean, renewable energy. We spent about 20 minutes exploring on computers.

As we returned to the carpet, students were already thinking about a topic that mattered to them and were primed to begin a deeper dive as we move into the 5th grade curriculum. I can’t wait to see what develops.

Youth Leadership

As we closed out our time, I wanted to show them that this wasn’t just an assignment to keep them busy. We truly want to support students in civic engagement in whatever way we can and for whatever causes they believe in. I left them with one last example of youth leadership in the United States.

We looked at the climate lawsuit of Juliana vs. The United States. These 21 youth are suing the US Government for careless environmental practices that are impacting their right to life, liberty, and property. Their case began back in 2015 and the government has tried to silence their voices. However, in July 2018, the US Supreme Court ruled in their favor that their case must be heard. You can learn more information about them at https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/us/federal-lawsuit/

I hope that each student in 5th grade finds ways their voices can be heard whether it’s in our classes, our school, our community, our state, our country, or the entire world.

In writing, students crafted a persuasive essay about why their civil rights leaders should win the Barrow Peace Prize (named after our school).

Using Flipgrid, students recorded their essays and art.

Now, the students are ready for you! They need you to visit their videos, listen to & like their work, and most importantly vote on which of the 4 civil rights leaders should win the 2018 Barrow Peace Prize. In late February, we will connect with Flipgrid via Skype and announce the winner.

Please share this project far and wide so that we can get as many votes as possible. All videos and the voting form are linked together on this Smore:

There’s a lot going on in the world right now and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the many current issues being debated and decided on in our country and around the world. As a teacher librarian, it’s challenging because I want to support all students and families knowing that I might not personally agree with their perspectives. I make sure that I step back and listen to the students, support their research and perspectives, and check my own beliefs.

Recently, Ms. Olin, 5th grade social studies teacher, came to me with an idea. She wanted to get students thinking about current US & World issues and considering what their own perspectives were based on the facts of the issues. She also wanted them to know that their voices mattered in the world and that they could get their thoughts out to local, state, and national representatives as well as the general public to have an influence on decisions being made.

Ms. Olin started this project in her classroom by sharing the book I Have a Right to Be a Child by Alain Serres. This sparked discussion about basic human rights and current issues in the world. She also shared news sites with them so that they could start reading current articles about various trending topics, especially if they weren’t familiar with the current topics being debated. Through these sites, students began to choose a topic that they were interested in, curious about, or passionate for. Sites included Newsela, CNN Student News, PBS News Hour, and Time for Kids.

After two days of exploring, students selected their topic.

In the library, we focused on the importance of raising our voices when we have concerns. I read excerpts from Be A Changemaker by Laurie Ann Thompson.

“Don’t wait. Don’t wait to be powerful, to change the lives and communities around you significantly.”

I also read excerpts from It’s Your World by Chelsea Clinton.

“We can–and should–respectfully disagree with others who have reached different answers from ours” and “Even if we disagree with one another, it’s important to recognize what the facts are”.

Ms. Olin and I both encouraged students to look at issues from all sides and to gather as many facts as possible. With those facts, they could form their own opinions on the issues and brainstorm some possible actions they hope are taken.

We took some time to look at the Letters to the Next President project to see letters that were written by students from many location about a variety of topics. Students could sort the letters by their own topic and see what other students were saying.

As students looked at example opinions and continued to gather facts, they started filling out organizers to get their own thoughts together. In class, they began writing letters, protest signs, and editorial cartoons to express the facts and their own views.

Finally, students came to the library to begin sharing their voice. We spent some time talking about how we can make our voice visible. We could of course mail the letters and artwork to their intended recipients, but how else could we share our voice? I was able to talk to the students about my recent recognition as an AASL Social Media Superstar for Sensational Student Voice and how social media and collaborative tools like Flipgrid allow us to spread our voices to an even larger audience.

We hope our voices are heard by our local, state, and national representatives, but even if they aren’t, we can share our voices with others and offer perspectives and actions that might encourage them to support our cause or make the world a better place. As students finished their work, they recorded their voices in a Flipgrid so that others can consider their perspectives and possibly join their collective voice.

We hope you will take time to listen to each student. If one of the voices speaks to you, give them a response. Better yet, if they inspire you, consider writing your own letter and adding your voice to our grid. We invite your students to join our voices as well.

As we were closing our time in the library, some of the students spoke up and said, “I bet Mr. Trump won’t even read our letters.” This was a great opportunity for Ms Olin and I to repeatedly say to the students, “Your voice matters”. We talked about collective voice, and how sometimes a single voice isn’t heard by someone like the president. However, that single voice can inspire other voices who come together collectively around a common cause. This was a great closing because even as an adult I sometimes wonder why I should even take time to call or write my representatives. However, I was reminded that our individual voices do matter and collectively they make impact.

Our 5th grade is currently studying the impact on American life that several famous inventors had. When I was brainstorming with Shelley Olin, 5th grade social studies teacher, we began to wonder about connections these standards had to makerspace. It started as an idea seed and grew into a set of experiences for all 5th graders to engage in.

I wanted students to put themselves into the shoes of an inventor so that they could begin to understand the perseverance and curiosity that inventors have. We focused on 3 of the inventors: Thomas Edison (electricity), Alexander Graham Bell (communication), and the Wright Brothers (flight).

I prepared 3 centers on electricity, communication, and flight. Each center included a biography about the inventors, instructions for an activity, and a clipboard to leave wisdom for the next group to learn from.

For flight, I selected some paper airplanes that could be made from a full sheet of paper. I also included books about other paper airplanes.

For communication, I created 2 choices. One was to use littlebits to create a tool for communicating using Morse code. I included a buzzer and LED bit as well as button, pulse sensor, and slide dimmer bits. The other experience was to create a tin can phone. I provided coffee cans and cups and various kinds of string.

For electricity, I copied instructions for making a simple paper circuit using a coin battery, led light, and copper tape. I put materials in Ziploc bags so each group would have what they needed to create a circuit. I added extra led lights for tinkering beyond an simple circuit.

It took a long time to prepare all of the materials for 3 back-to-back 5th grade classes. I had to have everything ready for an immediate turn round between classes.

Before coming to the library to engage in some makerspace activities related to these themes, students read about each inventor in textbooks and on PebbleGo. They gave Ms. Olin their top 2 interests out of the 3 themes so that she could put them in groups.

In the library, we started by looking at the littlebits invention cycle. There’s not just one place to start in the cycle and it doesn’t necessarily follow a linear sequence. We talked about how students could start with “create” by following the directions that I had given. Then they could play with their creation and begin to remix ideas to create an improved version or an alternative invention. By the end, I hoped that they would have something to share with the rest of their class or group. It really seemed like it could be linear in talking about it, but I quickly saw that it is very fluid.

After our quick intro, students sorted into their chosen task and got to work. Luckily, Ms. Olin and other collaborative teachers joined the class during this session. At times, we had me and 3 teachers supporting students around the library. It was 3 very different activities, so having the extra support was beneficial.

What I quickly saw was how much students wanted to just jump in and put things together without reading directions. At paper airplanes, students started folding paper in all sorts of folds and testing them out.

At paper circuits, students were sticking down tape and connecting the led to the battery without reading the instructions or even formulating a plan.

At tin can phones, students immediately started connecting cans.

But…as I stepped back and thought about it, isn’t that really what inventors do? They don’t necessarily have a set of instructions to follow. They just try things out to see what happens.

After some initial tinkering, several students did in fact try to read the instructions and many said that they wished they had read them at the beginning. It was an important lesson that we talked about and learned from. It’s hard to read all the instructions before putting something together when all you want is to see the finished product. I do that myself as an adult.

One thing that was really interesting was when students finished their first prototype and they started remixing. One example at the tin can phone center was when 2 groups decided to combine their two phones and see if they could make a four-way call.

At the paper airplane center, students started combining their planes together to see if a combination would create a better flying plane. They were truly embracing the idea of remixing.

When we came back together at the end, I asked students to think about what it was like to be an inventor. We had some great conversation about perseverance, staying calm through frustration, trying again, problem solving, and taking plenty of time to invent. We circled back to our inventors and considered how much time, frustration, and perseverance they each put into their inventions. I think the experience gave the students a greater appreciation for the inventors they were learning about rather than just passively reading about them.

We even had a moment to talk about continuing inventions in our makerspace or at home and entering them into our school maker faire coming soon. I loved how a simple idea from a social studies standard was able to weave together growth mindset, literature, social studies, and makerspace all into one experience.

Our Barrow 2nd graders have been hard at work researching 6 people from history to nominate for the Barrow Peace Prize. As part of this process, the students developed a list of criteria for what character traits should be represented by the winner of the peace prize. They wrote persuasive essays and created pieces of art work with Ms. Foretich, our art teacher. You can read more about what the students have done in the post, Beginning the Barrow Peace Prize.

This week, students have been coming in to the library in groups of 4 for 15 minutes to record their persuasive essays. When they come, I give them a quick overview of Flipgrid and remind them that there work will be seen by lots of people. Then, they split up around the library and we make sure that the space is relatively quiet for recording. I setup a question for each person from history so that all of the Ruby Bridges videos are together, all the Langston Hughes videos, etc. During the process, students take a picture of their artwork for the Flipgrid and then record themselves reading. Some chose to show their artwork while recording, and other chose to have their face on the video.

One of the things I love the most about Flipgrid is that the videos are instantly uploaded in one central place. I don’t have to spend hours uploading and naming 100 videos after students have recorded.

Now that the videos are recorded, we need you and everyone you know to watch the videos and help us decide which person from history should be the 2016 Barrow Peace Prize winner. I’ve created a Smore page to pull everything together.

Our amazing 1st grade team and students have been working on their Wizard of Oz unit. I love this unit because they weave in so many content standards with Wizard of Oz as their guiding text. A part of this unit is the weather standards from science. Students have to know various kinds of weather as well as how to dress in that weather. Since this is a part of what meteorologists do, we decided to try something new this year by looking closely at the role of meteorologists. The goal was for students to write a weather report for the Wizard of Oz regarding the cyclone and to record the forecast in front of our green screen.

Students came to the library and we looked at a few videos of meteorologists reporting on severe weather. As we watched, students noticed things about the posture and speech of the meteorologist. They also pointed out many of the weather words he/she used.

As weather words were noticed, we added them to a shared Google doc.

This doc was shared with all classroom teachers to continue to add to and use in class. We also looked at another student-made video and noticed how the student introduced himself in his weather forecast and pretended to be outside in the story.

In the library, we also spent some time beginning the writing process of creating a weather report. Students continued working on this in class during writer’s workshop. The list of weather words continued to be used and added to. They also did a bit of rehearsing.

Finally, students returned to he library and one by one recorded themselves in front of the green screen with a tornado or other weather behind them. As students were recording, the rest of the class practiced, looked at weather books, and searched for the current weather in our area using apps on the iPad.

They loved seeing the weather magically appear on our iPad using the DoInk app on the iPad. We took all of the videos from the iPad and uploaded them to class playlists to share back with the class.

You can enjoy the variety of videos in each of these lists.

One of my favorite parts of this short project was how it tied to a real career and gave students experience with a real-world job related to the standards they were studying in science. They were each able to be a bit creative in their forecasting, and each student had a chance to use a cool technology to make their voice heard at such an early age.

Explored Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize in a Google Hangout and crafted a list of criteria for our own Barrow Peace Prize

Crafted a persuasive informational piece of writing which could be read in less than 90 seconds

Over the past 2 weeks, students have been coming to the library in groups of 4 during blocks of 10-minute segments. During each session, I put a sign on the library door to encourage people to enter quietly.

The teachers scheduled their students on a shared Google doc, so I knew who was coming at each 10-minute interval. This was really helpful for me to know if students really had some extra time or if they needed to finish and hurry back to class.

I put out a helpful list of instructions by 4 iPad stations in the library with all of the codes that students would need to get to their questions.

Students were focused and productive as they got their work ready for the world.

Now, the students are finished with their recording and they need your help.

They would like for you to visit their Google site and view videos about each of the 6 people. Then, help us decide who should win the first Barrow Peace Prize. Students decided that the person who wins should be someone who represents the following character traits:

Dependability

Kindness

Peaceful

Determined

Modest

Fairness

Bravery

Loyal

Honest

Perseverance

Respectful

Helpful

In a couple of weeks, voting will close and we will announce the winner of this year’s Barrow Peace Prize. Thank you for taking time to view the students’ work. If you have any comments about specific videos feel free to leave a comment or a Tweet for me to share with the students. Also, you are welcome to share this project with other educators you know and encourage them to view and vote, too!

Visit our Google site to view our videos and vote on the Barrow Peace Prize.